Originally this post was going to be a lot longer – the plan was to go into lots of detail about how to customise the SharePoint 2007 or Search Server Advanced Search page and extend the Result Type drop-down to allow selection of Acrobat PDF Files. Then I saw this post over at Get the Point which contains links to several very good articles from Ben Curry and Bill English describing how to customise the SharePoint 2007 Search Centre.

If we create a document in Microsoft Word 2007, we use standard document properties to create searchable metadata like this:

And once the document has been uploaded to SharePoint and successfully crawled, those properties become searchable through the Advanced Search page.

Equally, an Acrobat PDF document may contain properties. Here is the same document converted to PDF, this time showing the properties in Adobe Reader:

So how do we make it easier for our SharePoint users to search only within PDF files, and for specific document properties? Well, as you will see if you download and read the article mentioned above, the trick is to add a new ResultType for PDF files in the properties XML. NOTE – of course all of this assumes that your SharePoint server is already successfully crawling and indexing Acrobat PDF files…

The “properties” section which determines what can be selected for Result Type “Word Documents” looks like this:

Now, not all of the same properties can be found in a PDF document. In the test PDF document I created using the Office 2007 PDF add-in, the properties I was able to successfully search in SharePoint were Keywords, Name, Size, Subject, Created Date, Last Modified Date and Title. And this is the ResultType I added to my Properties XML to make this work:

Update 12 June 09 – Another SharePoint add-on worth a look if you are converting Office documents to PDFs is Muhimbi PDF Coverter for SharePoint. Right now it looks like you can convert to PDF from various Word document versions as well as RTF and plain text, although I understand more file types will follow. They also have a feature which lets you do the PDF conversion from a SharePoint Designer Workflow which looks like it could be useful. Muhimibi also tell me you get the option to copy metadata across when you create the PDF. I plan to try this out and hopefully post about it soon.

Since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” I’ve noticed quite a few bing URLs cropping up in the referrer stats for this blog. I thought it would be interesting to take an example of one of these referred searches, in this case “add pdf ifilter to sharepoint” and see how it fares with results from Bing and from Google.

Blackdog has a neat split-screen page where you can type a your query into one place and compare the Bing and Google results side by side. So I tried this –